HN Natural Food Pyramid

At HumanaNatura, we’ve tried before to move people away from thinking about nutrition in terms of food pyramids, since they often contain a good amount of bad advice. Popular food pyramids usually have a foundation of grains and cereals, as if we were farmers and graminivorous for millions of years. Next comes veggies and fruits, then protein-rich items that typically include more unnatural foods, and finally candy and sweets at the top, the modern junk food industry’s place at the table and of course what we all secretly most want, right?

Lately, some public health agencies have begun moving away from traditional and generally hard to remember food pyramids, though the diets they advocate are about the same. They may find, as we have, that old visual aids die hard, and that people will continue to think about food in pyramids for some time. As an alternative, if you want to see an optimal natural diet in a pyramidal shape, check out this one…

Our food pyramid reflects essential ideas from HumanaNatura’s Natural Eating technique, which is part of our science-based Personal Health Program. The pyramid emphasizes a diet based on our ancestors’ long natural life as hunter-gatherers, combined with our best science on healthy lifelong eating. You can see that there are only three tiers to our natural food pyramid: 1) a base of vegetables and fruits, which should comprise about two-thirds of what we eat each day by volume, 2) lean natural proteins – including meat, fish, eggs, and tree nuts – that should comprise the rest of our daily diet, and 3) a small “other” category for anything else you personally choose to eat, which ideally should be nothing but we know how it goes.

You will note that our pyramid is much simpler and easier to remember than others you may have seen, and notably contains no mention of grains, beans, starches, dairy, or junk foods. Our pyramid reflects the way humans have naturally eaten for eons…one that now has lots of new science suggesting we should too.

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